24 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
NOTEBOOK
STIR- CRAZY
What the Mad Trapper, Huck Finn, and the rest of us have in common.
BY IANFRAZIER
ILLUSTRATION BY MIROSLAV WEISSMÜLLER
O
n October 31, 2018, I read a story
in the New York Post about a Rus
sian scientist who stabbed another Rus
sian scientist at a research station in
Antarctica. Crime is uncommon on
that continent, but what made this one
even more unusual, according to the
Post, was that the one scientist, Sergei
Savitsky, had attacked the other, Oleg
Beloguzov, for giving away the end
ings of books. At the isolated station,
run by Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic
Research Institute, the two men had
been together for many months. Sa
vitsky was reading books from the li
brary to pass the time, and Beloguzov
kept telling him the endings; finally,
Savitsky snapped and stabbed Belogu
zov in the chest with a kitchen knife.
Beloguzov was flown to a hospital in
Chile, where he recovered. Authorities
brought Savitsky to St. Petersburg, ar
rested him, and charged him with at
tempted murder.
Note the date: October, 2018. The
story went around the globe instantly.
Dozens of news outlets picked it up.
The Post cited, as its source, a story in
the Sun, the British tabloid. Checking
online, including on Russian sites, I
could find no solid source for the de
tail about Beloguzov giving away the
endings of books. The Sun’s source was
unnamed. A stabbing did seem to have
occurred at Bellingshausen Station.
The incident was blamed on alcohol.
A Russian judge later dismissed the
case against Savitsky, who had no pre
vious record.
In retrospect, the facts of the case
are less important than the global shiver
of the story itself. The newsgathering
business is connected to the world’s un
conscious and also to surface reality.
With the story of Savitsky and Belogu
zov, everyday news coverage slipped
into prophetic mode. Covid would not
appear for another fourteen months,
but the planet somehow knew it was
heading for a period of lockdown that
would drive people crazy. Savitsky and
Beloguzov were early victims of a soon
tobeglobal complaint waiting up
ahead, in 2020. Entwined today with
Covid is the ageold mental malady
called cabin fever.
A
man whose real name nobody
knows showed up in Canada’s
Northwest Territories in the summer
of 1931 and built a cabin on the Rat
River, a tributary of the Peel, deep in
the bush. His not having acquired a
trapping license from the Royal Cana
dian Mounted Police in Fort McPher
son seemed strange, because people
who lived out where he did mostly
trapped furs for income. That winter,
Native people in the region complained
that he was disturbing their traps, and
four Mounties journeyed the eighty
miles to his cabin by dogsled to inves
tigate. He shot one of them through
the door and later escaped, on foot and
on snowshoes, eluding capture for more
than a month, crossing a range of moun
tains and covering maybe a hundred
miles in the middle of winter. He killed
one Mountie when a group of them
briefly caught up with him, and finally
died in a shootout after a bush pilot
who had been tracking him from the
air radioed his location to pursuers.
The man called himself Albert John
son, but that probably wasn’t his name,
and nobody knows where he came from.
He is sometimes called the Mad Trap
per of Rat River. Books and movies
have told his story and looked into the
mystery, but it remains unsolved. Be
fore the chase began, the Mounties dy
namited his cabin, so he couldn’t go
back to it. Not much dynamite was re
quired, because the cabin was eight feet
wide by ten feet long. The Mad Trap
per’s behavior indicates a case of cabin
fever, and an eightbytenfoot cabin
in the remote Canadian Northwest
would be a good place to get it. During
Entwined today with COVID is the age-old mental malady called cabin fever.
